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How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Do Great Work

#121

Post by imran-iq »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #118
grrdotcloud wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.

Do you have examples of 200+ page API documentation that doesn't have any errors or broken examples? Sounds like the law of small errors to me: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_4_00.html

Django docs come to mind

Re: How to Do Great Work

#122

Post by dmvdoug »

carabiner wrote: post #103
dmvdoug wrote: post #76

As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…

Traditionally, footnotes are straightforward explanations of terms or passages. Tech writers, in their grandiosity, have perverted them to contain randomass tangents that no one really cares about.

Whereas legal opinions use them either as a citation dump (known as “collecting cases”), as a place to bracket issues that are not being decided, or as a place to put a substantive response to a separate opinion in the case (if you’re an appellate court).

Re: How to Do Great Work

#123

Post by dmvdoug »

hospitalJail wrote: post #102
dmvdoug wrote: post #76

As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…

>But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest When you are famous, people give you the benefit of the doubt. When you are small fries, you are blogspam.

It’s more a tone issue. He’s a skilled enough writer to come across as sincere and well-meaning. Whether he is or not I have no clue, I don’t know the man.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#124

Post by ianbutler »

zug_zug wrote: post #55

I haven't finished this yet, will take more than one sitting to digest, but I'm already 90% sure I'm going to disagree with this one a lot. I like to validate people's advice by playing it out in hypotheticals, so let's take some random fields people may think they want to be great at, and apply this advice: chess, piano, philosophy, quantum physics, soccer. I think it's self-evident that his algorithm isn't suited f…

> Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear."

I think this is terrible advice for doing great work, probably good advice for doing shallow work that gets you paid. Great does not (always) mean wealthy, popular or well liked. Plenty of writers went through life with people telling them they sucked and then eventually people got it. Look at Charles Bukowski for example.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#125

Post by interroboink »

urs wrote: post #13

Just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to share Richard Hamming's classic talk from '86, "You and Your Research." Then I realized that the funny part is that PG has already linked to Hamming's talk on his site ( http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html ), and mentioned it on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048 ). There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask y…

There's an unspoken aspect of the word "important" here — important to you, or important to the world (society, etc)?

From Hamming:

"I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things."

It seems he is talking about the important to the world aspect. He wants to have a big impact on the world, and be where the action is. The goal is to make a name for yourself, or to at least have a hand in the next big transformations.

But there is also the "important to you" aspect. In Hamming's case, those two notions of importance align. But not so for everyone.

Quoting again:

"I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another."

So, he is happiest when working on problems that have big "important" implications for the world. Good for him; I'm glad he discovered that about himself, and followed what made him happy.

So now for my actual point: I'd encourage a person to actually first and foremost focus on what is important to them personally — what makes them happy — rather than what seems "important" from some external perspective.

I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy. But to put that choice on a pedestal as though it is the True Goal — to put "important to society" above "important to oneself" is putting the cart before the horse. It's how you get a bunch of unhappy people chasing after other people's dreams.

It's actually somewhat touched upon in TFA, with:

"The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious."

Indeed — like Hamming was. But not everyone is, and not everyone needs to be to be happy. I am just slightly irked by our somehow reserving the word "great" for ambitious people's accomplishments.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#126

Post by sacnoradhq »

travisjungroth wrote: post #6

> Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application…

Some categories are explored or unexplored because either they didn't have a compelling, defining entrant like smart watches or they're Chindōgu like flying cars and VR.

Build something that's currently painful you know there's a definite need for and people would gladly pay money for. Solving a burning pain is far more compelling than incrementally better with the gotcha of introducing the risk of change.

The biggest mistake people make is not letting things soak in a lean, passive income marketable way. They'll build something, shake the trees for customers for a little while, and then turn it off 3 months later when they're not instant internet billionaires. Not working would be 15 years later <$10k/year net profit. Let it simmer with as little engineering investment as possible. Never waste time on churn for churn's sake, or effort that doesn't add end-user UX value.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#129

Post by 331c8c71 »

_x5ft wrote: post #79
williamstein wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small." I scrolled up and down quickly through the essay, and the above was the very first thing I randomly read.

I find that quote rather condescending. It’s also an excuse in disguise.

"You are special (if you made it so far)" part is a cheap manipulation imo.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#130

Post by vsareto »

grrdotcloud wrote: post #60
_x5ft wrote: post #26

I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.

Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.

It’s hard to not be lazy in today’s corporate environments. You simply don’t get much for putting in the extra effort.

Hard work needs incentives. Companies want you to light that fire yourself so they don’t have to pay extra. It’s why I’m not curious about anything work-related (plus it’s hard to be interested in CRUD apps after a decade). Even if I was, I’d give the benefits to myself and not my company.

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